WE PRESENT SCHEDULING TEMPLATES FOR GAME SCHEDULERS

You can now download the entire spreadsheet in
Excel, Quattro Pro
and Lotus
1-2-3 formats (the Excel spreadsheet is more complete as I no longer
own copies of Quattro or Lotus and the Excel conversion utilities aren't that
good). The files don't use
bells and whistles and we have therefore used earlier than current file
versions, so you can have an older version of the software and still be able to
use the templates. (We said older - not completely antiquated!). Bear in mind, each file is quite
big - about 450K each but they'll download quite quickly even at 56 bps.

There is also a version of the
spreadsheet by a gentleman called Russell, who sent it to me a
few years ago. (Sorry, I lost his email and so only have the
name of the spreadsheet to go on!) This has a neat feature
that enables you to quickly convert team letters to team names.

How the Spreadsheets Work:

Every team is assigned a letter as the team name and every field time slot is assigned a number. All you
have to do is substitute the team name for the designated letter and the time
and field for the time slot number and, presto, a schedule!

We don't pretend that this is better than some of
the software packages out there, but it works and it's free.

Every schedule is designed so that every team
plays every other team. With a big division it is probable that the season
won't permit this unless games are twice a week. I will make up schedules
for other numbers upon request.

Every schedule comes in four versions:

Grid 1 is a grid in which each team can see who its
opponent is in any given week. Grid 2 shows each team's opponent, week by week.
Grid 3 shows the weekly match-ups, with weeks on the x axis and time slots on
the y axis. Grid 4 is Grid 3 transposed, with weeks on the y axis and time slots
on the x axis.

The four grids
yield identical results. Grids 1-3 can be stretched out on the x-axis
(Grid 4 on the y-axis) as many extra weeks as the regular reason requires.
The extra weeks are simply a repetition of the first n weeks, where n+1 is the
number of teams in the division (if there is an even number) or n+2 is the
number of teams (if there is an odd number).

I recommend you give coaches schedules based on Grid 3 or
4. Grids 1 and 2 are for scheduler's use to see quickly who is playing
whom and in what week.

What about teams playing twice a week?

Easy - just make week 1 the first game of the week, week 2 the second game and so on.

What do I do about odd numbers of teams?

Alternative 1. Take the grid for the number of teams plus
one. Allocate one of the team letters to "Bye". The team
playing the "Bye" team gets a bye that week.

Alternative 2. Take the team and the two
teams immediately following (or preceding) on the schedule and play a round
robin of half games (A v B, A v C, B v C). B is the bye team, and
has to wait for a half game between halves. But better than sitting out a
week!

Examples are given with
both byes and round robins of schedules for 7 and 9 teams. We can make up
schedules for different numbers on
request.

How about
an odd number of teams that play two games a day?

It can be done! Suppose you have seven teams.
Take the schedule for weeks 1 and 2. Have the two bye teams play each
other. Repeat for weeks 3 and 4 and weeks 5 and 6. You may have to
make some game time adjustments to avoid teams play too close together.
Here is an example.

What times do teams play?

The schedules do not give game times. That's
obviously a matter for each region. What Grids 3 and 4 do is to give
match-ups with numbered time slots, which you simply replace with the actual
times.

If there is an odd number of teams and you choose to do round robins rather than byes, the time
slot needs to be three halves, designated on the third schedule as RR1, RR2 and
RR3.

One thing to watch out for is balancing the number of very early morning or late afternoon games.
Grids 3 and 4 do this as much as possible by placing teams in varied time
slots. This is not so much of a problem if you play on more than one field
per division.

Home and Away

Grids 3 and 4 also show home and
away teams (home first). So far as possible, Grids 3 and 4 balance the
number of home and away games. However, if you only get part way through,
the number of home and away games may sometimes get slightly out of balance and
this has to be fixed manually.

Legal Stuff

Permission is given to copy or download the templates and use them for purposes of making up schedules of
games. Youth sports organizations - no charge. All others, please
send a check for $5 per set of templates or $25 for all of the templates
to AYSO Region 76, P.O. Box 1761, Beverly Hills, California 90213.
Permission is also given to link to this site but not within a frame or in any
other manner which gives any suggestion or impression, however remote, that the
templates or this site are the work of anyone other than the copyright
holders.

While we have tried
very hard to avoid clerical errors (such as teams playing twice in a week or not
at all) and especially to ensure consistency between each of the four grids, it
is possible that there are some errors and inconsistencies. Please let me
know and I will fix them for you and everyone else. I can be reached by
e-mail at mjkarlin@ayso76.org, by fax
at 310-388-5537 or by phone at 310-854-0898.